Visual displays of sound and music have several limitations that have hindered their widespread adoption for practical application in the fields of entertainment, education, art, and general sound analysis. These displays are difficult to interpret because they do not adequately illustrate the important fundamentals obscured within the audio, whether musical notes or a spoken voice in the surrounding visual noise. Prior three-dimensional displays show extreme visual clutter caused by overtones, inharmonics, or noise that obscure the fundamental elements in the audio.
The generated images do not produce a detailed, intuitively interpreted picture of the fundamental parts. Attempts to show the entire, unmodified frequency analysis in three dimensions produce an extremely cluttered scene, packed with thousands of three-dimensional “spikes” or other visual noise that obscure fundamental frequencies. In posted online examples, a punk-rock song by Iggy Pop looks very similar to a Gustav Mahler symphony, though the sonic content of these examples is vastly different. Prior art has not overcome the problems of visual clutter and noise obscuring the most important elements of the displayed audio.
Current video displays created from audio rarely move correctly synchronized to the audio they are supposed to portray or don't show a direct correlation with the music at all. These displays often use slow, flowing motions like waterfalls or fireworks to minimize how poorly the display synchronizes to the audio. Our senses immediately tell us when moving images are out of sync to sound. Prior art does not show a clear correlation between the moving display and audio playback or accurate synchronization between the sound and picture.